scholarly journals The “Re-Tuning” of János Arany's Life and Work in the Popular Education of the 1950s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ágnes Eitler
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Working People ◽  
Revolution Of 1848 ◽  
The Way

Abstract In 1948, in the year it came to power, the Hungarian Communist Party began building its legitimacy, using the occasion of the centenary, by appropriating the legacy of the Revolution of 1848. The need for a revolutionary transformation of culture heralded the advent of the scientific materialist worldview. The popular education system, created as a channel of the cultural revolution, conveyed the findings of the various branches of science and arts, combined with the rhetoric of political propaganda, to the “working people.” Revolutionism, which the Marxist view of history elevated to prominence, soon gained ground in the interpretation of Hungarian literary history via the compilation of “progressive literary traditions.” Public educators' literary presentations in villages and cities, as well as articles and cheap publications produced in large quantities all served to promote this central principle. The author examines the representation and interpretation of János Arany's life and work in various textual and visual popular education products. Certain junctures and directions in Arany's life, used as guidelines of the presentations, were highlighted in the image of Arany mediated by filmstrips and newspaper articles to make him one of the “poets of freedom.” Publications intended for the cultural and political education of “working people” set out the way in which to relate to the poet and the framework for interpreting his writings. Through the Arany poems that popular educators employed in scientific education, the author points out the way in which textual and visual representations became carriers of added content in a given context and a possible means of the “rural class struggle.”

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

scholarly journals Navigating New Approaches for Grassroot Community Theatre in a (Post-)Covid World

2021 ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Kerrie Reading
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Community Theatre ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The cultural revolution of 1968 paved the way for many artists to reconsider how and where theatre was made. Community theatre gained currency and one company who became prominent during this cultural shift was Welfare State, later Welfare State International. They were one of the theatre companies who focused not only on a community theatre aesthetic but a grassroot one. I examine the radicality of community theatre and consider the efficacy of the historical approaches to engaging with communities in a (Post-)Covid world. I acknowledge and explore the shifting understanding of communities and assert that a deeper engagement is needed to foster collectivity (Tannahill 2016; Fişek 2019; Weston 2020; Bartley 2021). To reconsider the role that theatre may play in the future, I focus on a grassroot approach to community-led work and posit that location will be a key component to how theatre is made as we emerge from a pandemic.

scholarly journals A Romanian Heroine of British Origin — Maria Rosetti

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-292
Author(s):  
Gabriela Mihăilă-Lică
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The Public ◽  
Unitary State ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Revolution Of 1848 ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract The paper analyses the image of Maria Rosetti, the first female journalist in Romania, one of the personalities that played a crucial role for the outcome of the Revolution of 1848, and the way in which she remained in the public consciousness. Born in Guernsey, Scotland, the sister of the diplomat Effingham Grant and wife of the Romanian revolutionary Constantin Alexandru Rosetti “made the cause of Romania her own“. Despite being a foreigner, through everything she did, Maria Rosetti tried to help her adoptive country evolve and become a modern unitary state. Besides playing an active role in the escape of her husband and of other revolutionaries arrested by the Turks, she was also the mother of eight children (only four survived) in whom she instilled the most fervent patriotism. Last, but not least, the wife of C. A. Rosetti used her literary talent for pedagogical purposes in order to educate the younger generations according to the desiderata of a new Romanian society. Admired by her contemporaries and by her followers, her portrait was immortalized by C. D. Rosenthal in the famous painting “Revolutionary Romania”, becoming a symbol of the love and of the power of sacrifice for her country.

Islamic Literature in Translation

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-43
Author(s):  
Lois Giffen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Time Span ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Great Books ◽  
Direct Acquaintance ◽  
The Way ◽  
Islamic Literature

This course of one semester for undergraduates samples the literature—broadly defined—of the Arab, Persian and Turkish peoples and a time span of from just before the rise of Muhammad to modern times. It is literature-centered, i.e., the attention is on the reading and discussion of certain works or selections from works, rather than on literary history. Conceived more on the style of a Great Books course, its aim is to give the student as much direct acquaintance as possible in a few weeks with the thought, and the literary sensibilities of a great civilization. An alternative title would be Islamic Humanities, taking a cue from the more inclusive Oriental Humanities courses and the successful Western Humanities courses which led the way for them.

THE HISTORY OF THE CREATION OF THE BALLET "THE WHITE-HAIRED GIRL"

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 85-91
Author(s):  
Chen Xinheng ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Chinese Opera ◽  
Chinese Leadership ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Classical Ballet

The article is devoted to the history of the creation of the ballet "The White-Haired Girl", which was included among the "exemplary productions" during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The plot of the ballet, based on class contradictions between landowners and peasants, has folklore origins: first it appeared in the novel, then the first national Chinese opera was created, later adapted for cinema and became the basis for the ballet. The ballet "The White-Haired Girl" was commissioned by Chinese leadership. It includes the historical facts of the class struggle and shows the formation of a personality ready to resist exploitation and fight for freedom for all. The ballet's music, composed by Yan Jinxuan, also includes revolutionary folk songs and numbers taken from the opera of the same name. Compared to the opera, the ballet enhances revolutionary features in the characters. The choreography harmoniously combines classical ballet pas with the characteristics of Chinese folk dance and martial arts. The ballet "The White-Haired Girl" is performed with ongoing success since its inception in 1965 to the present day and is rightly considered a "red classic" with a high ideology and artistry.

‘The Sultan’s self shan’t carry me’: Negotiations of harem fantasies in Byron’s Don Juan

2011 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Jennifer Sarha
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Sexual Fluidity ◽  
Literary Traditions

Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a poem which depends on gendered literary traditions for both its originality and its intelligibility. In the harem episode of cantos V and VI, we can recognise a libertine fantasy, an Orientalist premise, and a picaresque adventure, but also some traces of epic, the gothic and literature of sensibility. Yet, these tropes are consistently complicated in the poem and used to undermine the gendered foundations of their traditions. This essay considers the formulation of such subversions through explicitly literary paradigms: what signs of gender are referred to, and how are they made intelligible as fictional constructs? By interrogating the use of gendered tropes, their formation as intelligible concepts within literary history, and their negotiations with sexualised conventions of narrative, I intend to highlight the discrepancies in the heteronormative construction of these literary paradigms and Byron’s use of them to suggest sexual fluidity.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Jing Meng
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
First Person ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Autobiography, then, has the unenviable task of confronting, confounding, and even confirming the assumptions, impressions, and (mis)conceptions about the author’s or filmmaker’s identificatory positionings. —Alisa S. Lebow1 1.Alisa S. Lebow, First Person Jewish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xviii. Born after the Cultural Revolution, I began to know about that historical event from the odd line in a textbook and through occasional films and television dramas set in that period. To a large extent, filmic representations, be they memoirs or fictions, form the way I perceive and make sense of this historical period that I never experienced. The Cultural Revolution, though known to many people as ten years of turmoil and disaster, seems to me a distant, tough, and yet passionate era. My parents recount anecdotes of their schooldays, and they sometimes even express longing for the ‘good old days’ of innocence and carefreeness. In the 1995 film ...

Chinese Art of the Cultural Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Ma
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cultural Sites ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Visual Materials ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The art of the Cultural Revolution in China, created during the ten-year period from 1967 to 1977, includes a large variety of visual materials in different media. Generally characterized by unambiguous and heroic images that appealed to the masses, these artworks became powerful tools of political propaganda. Most scholars attribute the beginning of the Cultural Revolution to the 1965 play HaiRui Dismissed from Office. Written by Wu Han, a local Communist official, the play was a thinly veiled critique of Mao Zedong. Though semi-retired in the early 1960s, Mao was determined to hold on to power by launching a new revolution to reawaken young Chinese people and root out the counterrevolutionary and anti-proletarian elements in society. Under Mao’s directive, people, places, and things representing the Four Olds (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas) were targeted and violently attacked by young people wearing red armbands and carrying the Little Red Book, a collection of quotes by Mao. Party officials, teachers, professors, authors, and artists had their homes raided and were publically dragged out by the Red Guards for public humiliation. In addition, historical and cultural sites were desecrated and vandalized. While the real violence only lasted the first few years, it set the tone of militarism and revolutionary fervor for the next decade, which permeated through all the arts.

Generative Themes

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-72
Author(s):  
Paul Apostolidis
Keyword(s):  
Social Research ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Critical Awareness ◽  
Oppressed People ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Working People ◽  
Multiple Levels

This chapter crafts a vision for social research that provokes critical opposition to the forces driving precaritization by drawing on popular education. Freire suggests that researchers should listen methodically for the “generative themes”—characteristic uses of language—through which oppressed people name their daily struggles. Folding such thematic inquiry into a broader approach called “critical-popular research” opens two complementary trajectories of social critique and political activation. As focal points for local popular-educational dialogues, such themes can spark critical awareness and practical resolve among the poor and excluded. A theme’s generative potential also springs from its resonances with existing critical-theoretical accounts of general social tendencies that affect certain groups especially harshly but also implicate working people at large. In association with a politics of the “demand,” critical-popular research can invite affective, reflective, and practical responses that combine militancy with receptivity and challenge precarity on multiple levels.

Deformation forms the course of literary history

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Martindale
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Direction ◽  
Statistical Analyses ◽  
Altered State ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Altered State Of Consciousness ◽  
Literary Change ◽  
The Way

The Russian Formalists and Czech Structuralists argued that foregrounding devices such as deformation and deautomatization are central to literature. They saw that such devices build a pressure for novelty into literature. Literature must change constantly because readers gradually become used to and bored with initially novel and interesting deformations. Formalist and Structuralist theorists saw that literature should change but could not explain the direction in which it would change. They hypothesized that the direction of change is determined by extra-literary sociocultural forces. I argue that this hypothesis may be wrong. If we examine the way in which people think of novel word combinations in the first place, we can formulate a theory that explains the direction of literary change. Production of novelty often involves movement away from ordinary waking consciousness toward an altered state of consciousness. Within the confines of a given style, to produce something even more novel, poets must regress to an even more altered state of consciousness. The state of mind in which a poem is produced to some extent determines the words used in the poem. Given that the pressure for novelty is always present whereas other forces acting upon poets vary, we can predict the direction in which poetry tends to move from the alterations in consciousness required to produce ever more novel poetry. Statistical analyses of several poetic traditions show that this is, indeed, the main direction in which poetry evolves.

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